RELP – the reliable event logging protocol

I am currently really bugged by shortcomings in the plain tcp syslog protocol in its current form. And I finally made up my mind. Instead of wasting time on fixing broken plain tcp syslog transport mode (e.g. by implementing half-duplex, which isn’t standard anyhow), I’ll do “the right thing”. I thought rfc 3195 is the right thing. But it carries a lot of overhead that I really don’t need. And, most importantly, any standard additions takes ages to go through the IETF (I know what I am talking about, have finally succeeded to get a better syslog rfc though it in “just” 4 (or 5?) years — and it is still waiting to be published…).

So instead of adding on any of these existing protocols, I’ll do a new, lightweight but capable protocol specifically designed to solve the shortcomings we currently experience. Please welcome RELP, the “reliable event logging protocol” (name based on the quite successful selp [simple event logging protocol] effort: http://www.monitorware.com/en/workinprogress/selp.txt).

Relp will evolve over time. I hope to do something useful relatively soon, and it will be extended as the project progresses. The ultimate goal is to have a good, very reliable, protocol for rsyslog-to-rsyslog communications. I’ll don’t care about the outside world, so I can do the best of breed solution. For the rest of the world, rsyslog will of course continue to support plain tcp syslog and will get better support for rfc 3195. But if you wanna go hardcore on high-reliability, high-performance event logging, relp will be your choice.

Technically, I’ll split this off into rsyslog relp input and output plugins AND an independent librelp, which provides core protocol functionality (just in case somebody else wants to support it in the long term, so this will not be tied to rsyslog).

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